Ubuntu had inherited from Debian a problem whereby network interfaces’ names can be inconsistent from one reboot to the next. The installer identified my mobo’s wired network interface as eth1. On rebooting, the OS decided it was eth2, but /etc/network/interfaces had been configured to use the (now non-existent) eth1, hence no network.

In days’ past, I’ve used /etc/iftab to ensure it didn’t recur, but, apparently, as of Gutsy, this approach is deprecated, and the shiny new method is to use udev.

I then spent much time bashing my head against trying to arrange to boot into an encrypted root filesystem within an LVM2 logical volume on an encrypted LUKS partition, similar to this but using yaird to create the boot image. This is something I’ve done in the current Ubuntu release, Feisty. But I ran into a couple of bugs in Gutsy’s yaird package. (The trivial one also existed in Feisty, but I didn’t report it then.)

It’d be nice if Ubuntu offered an encrypted root installation option like Debian Etch, but I’d probably want enough things different from any set of options offered to end up doing it manually anyway.

I’m pretty sure I know how to fix the problem now. But I haven’t had the time to take another crack at it, so my first look has been stalled here.

Maybe when I’m done, I’ll write yet another encrypted root howto.

Oh well. The Weecam’s off to the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, and I’ll give iwrandom a try. (But a webcam in the dark is so much cooler, drat it.)

So far as I can read on the Interwebs, most people facing this install rubygems as root, and do their subsequent gem installs as root, letting them write wherever in the filesystem they like.

That makes me queasy. I don’t want to mix two package systems in the same environment.

So here’s how I installed ruby/rubygems/rails in Ubuntu 7.04, with all gems under /usr/local.

Following the ruby1.8 package’s own instructions for a full Ruby 1.8 distribution:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev ri1.8 rdoc1.8 irb1.8 ruby1.8-elisp ruby1.8-examples libdbm-ruby1.8 libgdbm-ruby1.8 libtcltk-ruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8

I assign ownership of /usr/local and everything under it to the admin group, and make /usr/local and its subdirectories group-writable (per Ubuntu’s defaults, my primary login, which I created during installation, is a member of the admin group.)

sudo chown -R root:admin /usr/local 
sudo chmod 775 /usr/local /usr/local/*

I get and install rubygems.

mkdir /usr/local/lib/rubygems
export GEM_HOME=/usr/local/lib/rubygems
cd /usr/local/src
# as of this writing, the latest rubygems from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/20989/rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
tar xzf rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.4
ruby setup.rb config --prefix=/usr/local
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

I add the following to my .bashrc, but you’ll want them in any environment using gems. With multiple users on a system, you might want to put this in /etc/bash.bashrc.

export GEM_HOME=/usr/local/lib/rubygems
export RUBYLIB=/usr/local/site_ruby/1.8
export RUBYOPT=rubygems
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/lib/rubygems/bin

The grand finale:

source .bashrc # or wherever you put them
gem install rails --include-dependencies

It’s that easy!

References:

• Installing Rails and Mongrel on a Shared Host
• Ruby on Rails on Debian
• RubyGems User Guide, Ch. 3

I asked my email-pal: “UNIX or Windoze?”. He replied “UNIX”. I said “Ah…me too!”.

I asked my email-pal: “Linux or AIX?”. He said “Linux, of course”. I said “Me too”.

I asked him: “Emacs or vi”. He replied “Emacs”. I said “Me too. Small world.”

I asked him: “GNU Emacs or XEmacs?”, and he said “GNU Emacs”. I said “oh, me too.”

I asked him “GNU Emacs 19 or GNU Emacs 20”? and he said “GNU Emacs 19”. I said “oh, me too.”

I asked him, “GNU Emacs 19.29 or GNU Emacs 19.34”, and he replied “GNU Emacs 19.29”. I said “DIE YOU OBSOLETE NOGOOD SOCIALLY MALADJUSTED CELIBATE COMMIE FASCIST DORK!”, and never emailed him again.

Ubuntu Linux 7.04 beta, GNU Emacs 23.0.0.1 alpha, with Xft support. But I’m reformed — any Linux or BSD distro and Emacs flavor is OK by me. (Everyone else can DIE!)

The text boxes on the edit entry page are tiny little things, because mt-static/styles.css is missing an entry for the full-width class. This can be fixed by putting this in your mt-static/user_styles.css:

And for Bruce Schneier, SHA-1 is merely a compression algorithm.

If you’re good enough to use lisp, you’ll soon be frustrated with lisp. Lisp is not an adequate lisp. By the time my bus had made it two blocks I’d written some simple lisp macros that were so powerful they made lisp completely obsolete and replaced it with a new language. Fortunately, that new language was also called lisp. And i was able to prove, mathematically, that the new lisp i’d created was both far superior to lisp in every conceivable way, but also exactly equivalent to lisp in every possible way. I was very excited by this. But also found it very boring.

It brought to my mind the treacherous optimization of grep.

The consumer offers do not permit customers to host any type of server, personal or commercial.

And they block port 80 and inbound port 25, the standard ports for HTTP and SMTP.

Too many things could be accurately termed servers for this to be meaningfully enforced without outraging all of their customers. Allow remote desktop connections in Windows XP Pro, and you’re running a server.

Nearly anything useful you could do with any significant percentage of that upload speed could be described as operating a server. Clearly, they have no intent of enforcing the rule to the letter, or they’d be forbidding a lot of things that most of their customers want.

But it gives them a means of cracking down on anyone daring to actually make use of that upload speed.

This is false advertising + plausible deniability.

Envy me.

Here’s a story about two Sun engineers showing a new UI to Tufte.

We were very proud of our user interface and the fact that we had a way to browse 16,000(!!) pages of documentation on a CD-ROM. But browsing the hierarchy felt a little complicated to us. So we asked Tufte to come in and have a look, and were hoping perhaps for a pat on the head or some free advice.

He played with our AnswerBook for about 90 seconds, turned around, and pronounced his review:

“Dr Spock’s Baby Care is a best-selling owner’s manual for the most complicated ‘product’ imaginable — and it only has two levels of headings. You people have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven’t even stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it’s complicated.”

Oh.

I am the very model of a modern major database,
For gigabytes of information gathered out in userspace.
For banking applications to a website crackers will deface,
You access me from console or spiffy user interface.

My multi-threaded architecture offers you concurrency,
And loads of RAM for caching things reduces query latency.
The data is correctly typed, a fact that I will guarantee,
Each datum has a data type, it’s specified explicitly.

Black sidekick improbably even thicker than the other two and pompous with it: The error message does imply some sort of dynamic linkage.

Me, gravely: Error messages always lie.

Necwfh: So what shall we do?

Me: Double the RAM, update the virus checker, scan the string tables, log the exceptions and put it on a sampling profiler.

Bsietttotapwi: How will this help isolate the problem?

Me: It won’t, you moron. We’ve got 45 minutes to fill. It would be fatal to make a correct diagnosis this early in the episode. And while you’re up, go have a look round the original programmer’s auntie’s holiday cottage in Cornwall. I’ve a feeling we may discover an Important Clue there.

A couple of weekends ago, I planned to install Ubuntu Edgy Knot 3 on a new hard drive. I’d been mostly planning on leaving off Windows entirely, but I’ll probably want to play Civilization 4 some day — its price is finally dropping, and there have been two patches released. What the heck, thought I, I’ll install Windows.

Windows is fussy about being the first thing on the disk, so I went to install it first. I didn’t take notes on the process, so I may err in some of the details that follow, especially on the exact order of things.

The disk partitioner was crude and unfriendly. There was no solicitation of keyboard preferences beforehand, so I had to operate it in QWERTY rather than my preferred Dvorak. My Windows XP CD is an update SP2 disc, so I had to pop my Windows 2000 CD in and out to prove I was eligible to use the update disc. And type in a long ugly string from the packaging. The installation took a long time, but didn’t require more attention.

Rebooted into Windows. Balloons popped up about having 30 days to activate, and my system may be at risk. Well, actually, I couldn’t activate, and my system was not at risk, because I had no Internet access — it had failed to install a driver for my ethernet hardware — an Intel chip on a 4-year-old Dell server whose motherboard is a clone of an Intel motherboard, so we’re talking cutting-edge esoteric hardware, you understand.

Dug up the driver CD that came with my machine. Installed the ethernet driver. Went to Internet Options and set my home page to update.microsoft.com, the only page I ever want to use IE for, and disabled ActiveX controls everywhere else. Opened IE. It chugged for a while, and then said I needed to update my Windows Update version (to include, among other things, Windows Genuine Validation.) I did so. Had to reboot; did so.

Realized I forgot to take the driver CD out; had to wait for it to boot to that so I could exit gracefully and reboot into Windows. Went back to update. It chugged for about a minute, then said I needed to validate before I could update. Tried to validate. It told me I had to activate before I validated. I activated, crossing my fingers that changing the hard drive (again — I’d done it in the past with Windows installations on this machine) wouldn’t cross the threshold of hardware difference that would require me to talk to Microsoft to make a case that I deserved to install their OS. It didn’t — woo hoo! Then I went back to update. Chugged for a minute again, but then I could finally validate.

Looked through the 60-some-odd updates. Declined to install the one where they’d run a service in the background to check whether my OS was legitimate and pop up warnings if it wasn’t. Installed them. Rebooted.

Then I went about installing all the things I wanted to have some sense of security on a Windows box — firewall, antivirus, Firefox, startup control monitor, the TweakUI powertoy so I could disable autorun on all drives current and future.

Then I installed Edgy.

Had a much better tool to partition the remainder of the drive. Answered some questions about locale, including getting to select Dvorak before I had to do any typing. It recognized my ethernet hardware. Spent a while installing things (a much shorter while than Windows), I rebooted, and there I was.

Yeah, there are some bumps in the road with Linux, usually having to do with using hardware whose use the manufacturers support only with Windows, or using software to handle propietary formats, which tend to come with licenses that preclude a free Linux distribution from installing by default.

But, on balance, I find installation and maintenance of Ubuntu to be easier than Windows.

When I was facing this problem, my employer was bought by a huge corporation. Hey, maybe they had a GIF license, and all my troubles would be over! I managed to get the question posed to the legal department of the corporation had a license that allowed us to generate GIFs.

Being the top-notch legal minds of a high-tech corporation, they came back with this answer:

“Well, it depends on the content of the images.”